To say that I can teach French because I speak it is like saying that because I drive a car, I could build one. From scratch.

We pick up where Madame Le Vrai departs as she begins her maternity leave. Au moment she is saying she’d like to wait until October 1. Bon idea! I tell her. “Formidable!” I would love an extra week to crawl through the wormhole called Schoology and Google Docs to find out what we will be doing. The last time I conjugated verbs there was chalk dust on the floor and textbooks in the desks. You had to sign one out and wrap it with a paper grocery bag or the Sunday comics, not even those little textbook speedos. To say that I am out of my element, here, teaching French 1 and 2 at the end of September in the middle of my life and what we thought would be the end of a pandemic is—how do you say, euphémisme. What do you mean there are no lesson plans? Because of flux, a universal term describing the state of life for these students of the 2020s, there isn’t really a solid set of plans. Like, what to actually teach. The pandemic, online learning, changing philosophies and pedagogies of language instruction and education in general swirl around this one necessity: what the %$#@! to do with them for a 90-minute class each day?

Over the summer and moving into the post I am shared all kinds of handy items: access to an online textbook, a YouTube playlist of French songs, daily plans for roughly one third the 15-week gig, Google drive “shared with me files” of various world language personnel at the county level and the piece de resistance: the county’s pacing guide. Teach “time” before October 31. Teach weather. Teach relative pronouns, interrogatives the passé composé. OK…how am I supposed to teach if I am swimming in it: Hoooowwwwwwww? As the start date nears my panic rises. I feel better prepared to deliver and raise a baby than to take on this job and glibly offer with Madame to switch places. One night at the dinner table close to tears, I relate to my guys what I’m up against. The time is getting close when I will be in it for 15 long weeks. Will, the student extraordinaire (“extraordinary” in the sense that if it’s on the syllabus he ain’t interested. But everything else is cool) goes upstairs to his self-made three-screen computer and bangs out a lesson plan on Telling Time en francais. Forty minutes later he bounds down the stairs and pulls it up on my county-issued laptop: “Mom, look mom, you can do this…” The irony about swamps me but I am too grateful to laugh. Why not? I absolutely will use it. His lesson plan includes two helpful videos from YouTube, a Google drive document, a double-sided work-sheet and homework. The boy assigned homework.

To construct in my mind, a curriculum for these kiddos, I am reaching back over four decades to what was done in my first French classroom. We were given French names, we introduced each other, we counted aloud, we played round robin games in French, we learned, by drilling, all of the irregular verbs. Repetez, s’il vous plait. Even the verb repeter probably isn’t in the vocabulary anymore. Repetition. Grilling and drilling. Nobody will stand for that today. Nobody wants it. They want fun French songs and videos, the county wants immersion and the students, from first impression–well, they are teenagers so they want evasion, neither of which makes for effective pedagogy. I think teacher schools these days have hit upon “stations” as the method du jour: they want to rotate the room like spinning plates, where nothing’s ever pinned down or any single one asked to show what he or she knows, where the strongest succeed as they would and will anywhere, and the ones that aren’t into it quietly drop away. Quelle heure est-il? “In my day…” runs through my mind like a faucet: In my day, we sat in rows, face front to the teacher, hands busy with note-taking, trying to collect what was given, gearing up to be called on any minute. Social distancing has ironically restored the desks to rows instead of random clusters and groupings, but it has not yet restored the personal responsibility. Nobody will stand for that today. Nobody wants it. I realize, in a mild panic, that I am not a teacher. What are my qualifications here? I speak French and I love kids. But I’m not a teacher. I’m not. I’m a substitute for the real thing.

Plus my learning is personal. Hardly fit for a classroom. Ask my feet. Arriving at any one of the four train stations in Paris I could still carry myself on foot and therefore by heart anywhere you’d like to go. I know this wonderful little boulangerie two blocks from Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cité–still there, I checked in 2018 though her Lady has since then lost her crown–and a quiet little Parc d’ Henri IV where the same Ile comes to a point in the blond waters of the Seine…. I have walked more miles in that city than any on American soil. Remember, I have stitched her in bridges, sewn her like a purse that I will carry forever. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, wrote my expat hero of my teen years, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast…” Weeks later, in class discussing the jours fériés (holidays), I quote Hemingway and we talk about the difference between and say, Easter and Christmas, or St Patrick’s day. The day for Mother’s day, Father’s Day, Easter and the like –these are moveable feasts. The date changes. Unlike Christmas or St Patty’s Day, which don’t. Did they not know this? Have they not thought about it? I discover they do not have any idea when is Mother’s and Father’s day(s) in America, let alone France (sorry parents, c’est vrai). But why not? How are there whole chunks of life going un-ruminated by this new set of humans? How can this be? On another section of the first unit tests a map of Europe, the lesson is the names and demographics of the countries that border France. I kid you not: There are kids who don’t know where Germany is. I point to the large landmass I “hiked” virtually all summer: Spain. It is unlabeled, as are the other countries, though the capital of Madrid clearly starred. Qu’est-ce que c’est? They do not know.

Part of the problem, beyond the lack of a standardized curriculum, is that the primer has shifted. I was educated in a different time. A time that answered to the world of ideas instead of the small town of standardized tests. A world that called you out and inspired you to connect and synthesize and make sustained intellectual forays rather than making you stay in to study “closed notes” and spit back poorly-worded abstractions from your short term memory. Vraiment! There is such a thing. “Closed notes” is what you use to help a third or fourth grader study for the SOL. They will make your brain bleed with boredom and your heart break. I promise you because I’ve just witnessed the results on a Unit 1 test: put multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks (with a word bank) and most will give it a go. Your PBs (polite and brights) will ace it every time from all the ways their life experience, their families’ priorities and pastimes and their reading—stuff transpiring outside the classroom–have given them that head start in life. But put on there an open-ended question “What do you think…?” and half the class will not get to the end of that sentence before the hands shoot up: What do you mean? What do you mean what do I mean “What do you think?” Oh people. Tell me we’re not in trouble. These people at the desks? They’re going to fly our planes and build our bridges, their hands will guide your hip surgery one day, never mind write our laws and public policies. I need them to know where Spain is. Me: What do you think? They: “Madame, I don’t understand the question…” What used to be the starting point for all modern education, Descartes and 18th century enlightenment (His name means “the maps”–isn’t that awesome?!)–I think therefore I am—is no longer relevant to the curriculum. Actually, I don’t actually think. Any more. Because I don’t need to. We have succumbed to the lie that what can’t be immediately measured can’t be taught.

So, what will we do all day? Well, to begin, I am an English teacher subbing as a mom who’s subbing as a French teacher. And what has this mom done all these many years with her own kids? I read to them. Daily until they would not have it anymore. For Will the last I made it through 5^th grade with all the Roald Dahl he could handle. It’s my go-to. It’s what I have done the past five years for pay at the Library: story teller. In a crisis, it’s the very thing that I cling to. Went there in the hardest days of toddlerhood, of step-family life, of church life, of all the lands we’ve travelled that were hard. Maybe harder than a 15-week post without lesson plans. I so remember finding my way to the nursery floor with a stack of picture books and reading them through it. By the time we were done the world was set to rights and the wild things were tamed. So I do a little research and choose: Les Miserables. An acclaimed children’s edition abridged from Hugo’s 1900-page tome in 18^th century prose (It’s one of the longest novels ever written). Don’t want to start a French revolution when the mob comes for me. In addition, I order several titles they should know in English to be read aloud en francais: Madeline (bien sur!) but also The Cat in the Hat and Bonsoir Lune. Bon Soir Lune!! During a lesson on adjectives I learn in passing that they do not know they story of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Or the ugly duckling. Ok, maybe they’ve “seen the movie” but none can tell me the original author or begin to relate the meaning. If Hans Christian Andersons’ misplaced fowl isn’t a middle schooler’s manifesto, I don’t know what is. I add it to the curriculum. Suddenly the freedom feels not daunting but inviting.

So, we will be doing a bit of this and a bit of that. I kind of get the memo: do not do anything systematically. Do not hint at mastery, beginning or end business. Textbooks are verboten. Dabble, sample, spin. Cut n’ paste so none of it wearies with its comprehensiveness. Then pitch it. Sell it. So will we have stories packaged in sentences instead of screens, we shall pluck our lessons off YouTube, of all places. I’ve spent more time on that this fall than ever in my life. Once the novelty wears off, I come to realize just how many bad videos are out there are cluttering up the cyberspace. The ones teaching time are insufferable. Come on people, I want to tell these yahoos on YouTube, just go back to work. I’d rather drag my students through six weeks of “Crazy Jenny’s glory tour of France” than subject them to some of this stuff. But just like a real teacher I realize my job will include not only assembling a curriculum but evaluating its pieces. Not all that different, I realize, from what I am asking 129 young people to do this fall. I realize we may be a good fit after all–me the wanna-be who’s never taught French and these people who seem…if not a little un-lifed, then certainly under-pondered. It makes me curious, to see what they do know and think. One thing is certain: I will model the kind of commitment and fortitude it will take for these twelve- and thirteen year-olds to tuck in to French grammar, especially in today’s classroom where somebody has put it out of reach on the highest shelf. Before the post begins I go in to help the real teacher set up the classroom for her short stint before le bébé. In a closet I discover a gold mine: dusty textbooks and teacher manuals, audio CDs (That’s modern, right, CDs??) transparencies for a projector and triceratops bones (That last bit is a joke. There aren’t really triceratops bones). I also find several maps of France, one of Europe and one of the arrondissements of Paris. I hang them up, every one. We will learn where we are, people, in relationship to others. As will I be with you for the next 15 weeks—in relationship. Now, what time is it?

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